UMATILLA — An avalanche of freshly picked oranges skitters through a curtain of soapy water and dances out the other side, where brushes wait to scrub away the dirt.

Some days, Sharon Faryna has to remind herself that her husband, Nick, isn't in his usual place at the conveyor belt helping clean and grade the fruit.

Faryna died last year at 63, leaving his wife of 40 years to navigate an industry that has long been battered by freezes and disease and pressured by development.

But instead of giving up or selling out to homebuilders, Sharon Faryna is expanding her business. She planted a new grove last year, and she's planning to move her retail store to a larger building.

"Citrus was definitely in Nick's blood," said Faryna, 63, a third-generation citrus grower and Umatilla native. "He was determined to keep citrus alive up in this area. I guess you could say it's in my blood also."

Faryna and other Central Florida citrus growers are holding on in an industry where so many others have failed.

The Farynas opened Faryna Grove Care and Harvesting while still in high school. He went on to graduate from the University of Florida with a degree in agriculture, and they raised two children while battling freezes, fruit flies and citrus canker.

Nick Faryna's experimentation in the 1980s with elevated microsprinklers, now widely used to prevent citrus-tree trunks from freezing, helped earn him a place in the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame. He was inducted posthumously Friday.

Some Central Florida citrus businesses are surviving in a beleaguered industry.

Two weeks after he died in May, Faryna's family decided to go ahead with plans to plant an 11-acre grove around the corner from the packinghouse.

The orange trees started as spindly "Charlie Brown Christmas trees," said the Farynas' daughter, Lauren Sutton, 32, a nurse who recently joined the family business full time. Now, they're several feet tall, and a close look reveals tender white buds among the leaves.

Sutton's husband, Kris Sutton, 36, manages the 200 acres owned by Faryna Grove Care and Harvesting and the 2,000 acres that Faryna takes care of for other owners. He quit his job with a power company in 2006 and joined his in-laws in spite of their concern that growing oranges, grapefruit, tangelos and tangerines might not be a stable enough business to support him, his wife and their two young sons.

"Who else can you trust but family?" he says by way of explanation.

Quite a few of the surviving Central Florida citrus businesses are family-owned, and they are facing the same challenges as the Farynas.

"There were years where [with] a 50- or 80-acre grove, you could send your kids to college and pretty much make a living," said Gary England, fruit-crop extension agent for seven counties from Osceola to Marion. "I don't think it's that way now."

David Evans, 66, a fifth-generation citrus grower and an owner of Nelson and Co. in Oviedo, said his family thought about calling it quits after the devastating freezes of the 1980s but decided to tough it out.

"We believe deeply in our heritage and our traditions," said Evans, who grows gift fruit and juice oranges. "We may be citrus growers, but we're also asset managers. It's a way of life on one hand, but it's also a business. So we have to be really thoughtful and strategic and deliberate in our approach."

Another threat is citrus greening.

Sutton said he hopes the business can ride out the current scourge of citrus greening, an insect-borne disease that ruins fruit and kills trees. It has reduced the Faryna family's seasonal yield from half a million boxes to 250,000 boxes, said Alex Santiago, manager of the family's packinghouse, Sunsational Citrus, which opened in 2002.

The University of Florida said in February that its Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences had received $13.4 million in federal money to research a cure. Meanwhile, growers fertilize the trees, spray with insecticide and hope, with Florida's $10.8 billion citrus industry at stake.

Among the concerned growers is Steve Crump, 47, a co-owner with his brother and parents of Vo-LaSalle Farms in Volusia County's DeLeon Springs. Their company has prospered by shifting from wholesale to retail, but it also sells to local fruit stands, juice plants and packinghouses.

"Big growers shop three years at Goodwill and one at Saks Fifth Avenue," Crump said. "You can tell the years they made money because everybody got a new car."

Diversification is a strategy that has worked for Conoley Citrus Packers in Winter Garden, a family-owned grove and packinghouse business operating since 1929.

Faryna Grove Care and Harvesting has found that sweet spot of diversity. Its oranges, grapefruit, tangelos and tangerines end up in supermarkets in the Northeast U.S. and for sale at Sunsational Citrus.

The fruit is handpicked and trucked from the grove to the packinghouse, where it's sanitized with a vinegar solution, inspected, washed, scrubbed, rinsed, polished with plastic and horsehair bristles, dried in two heaters and waxed. Then it's graded by size, and any remaining stems and leaves are snipped off.

Oranges deemed too small or large, blemished or otherwise imperfect are whisked by conveyor belt to a truck bound for a juice plant. Anything not good enough for juice becomes cattle feed.

Next season, Sharon Faryna plans to move her retail store from the packinghouse to a former bank she bought about a block away on State Road 19. She intends to add ice cream and candy to her current stock of jelly, honey, juice and fruit.

Her office will remain at Faryna Grove Care and Harvesting, which is decorated with citrus-themed pitchers, glasses, antique juicers and an orange-shaped cookie jar the Farynas received as a wedding present. She's following the dream she and her husband shared.